PIONEERING TALK-RADIO HOST AND SHOCK JOCK
DON IMUS • 1940-2019
Don Imus, one of radio’s most popular and polarizing figures, has died. He was 79.
The pioneering shock jock, whose career spanned nearly 50 years, was hospitalized on Christmas Eve and died Friday morning at Baylor Scott and White Medical Center in College Station, Texas, according to a statement from his family. No cause of death was given.
Imus, or “the I-man” as many of his friends and guests tagged him, reshaped radio with his crass but often insightful observations about current events and helped open the floodgates for the coarsened chatter that animates talk radio today. He retired from his show “Imus in the Morning” in March 2018.
Despite the base nature of his programs, the former Marine was still able to attract a lengthy and enviable guest list of prominent journalists, historians and politicians that included governors, U.S. senators and presidential candidates. At the height of his popularity, Imus reportedly earned about $10 million a year, and split his time at a Central Park West penthouse, a ranch in New Mexico and an estate on Long Island Sound.
“He’s one of the first who stretched the envelope on what could be said,” said Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers, a radio industry trade magazine. “He was dangerous in terms of language, an early pioneer in making the culture of radio reflect the mood of the street. He had moved beyond shock jock and influenced a lot of younger talent.”
Born in Riverside on July 23, 1940, John Donald Imus Jr. became one of the medium’s first so-called “shock jocks.” A hint of his wild and pranksterish behavior came early in his radio career in the late 1960s when he was at KXOA in Sacramento. He telephoned a local Mcdonald’s on-air and ordered 1,200 hamburgers — with and without various condiments.
The stunt earned him scores of listeners and eventually led to a Federal Communications Commission rule requiring disc jockeys to identify themselves when telephoning listeners.
Soon he moved to New York, and by the early 1970s was a top broadcaster for WNBC, where his biting humor earned him stellar ratings. But in what would be one of many personal setbacks suffered in his career, Imus was fired from the station for drug and alcohol abuse in 1977. After a stint in rehab, he came back after a couple years stronger than ever on another station.
From that point, he was more candid about his shortcomings, frequently speaking about his struggles with addiction and crediting recovery programs with making him a better person.
“Don Imus didn’t just go through the barriers of radio, he crashed through them,” said Tom Taylor, a journalist who has long covered the radio industry. “His irascibility and his determination to play the game by his own rules made him the opposite of all disc jockeys before him.”
As his show matured, Imus began infusing it with politics, a tack that began attracting politicians who were eager to court his millions of daily listeners. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton appeared on the show to helped revive his then-battered campaign, which had just suffered a sound defeat in Connecticut by former California Gov. Jerry Brown. Clinton and Imus clicked.
In many ways, Imus was his own mixed message — a cranky, crude comedian one minute, a well-read authority on history and politics the next. And even though he treated some of his political guests harshly, the show soon became a regular pit stop for pundits and members of the Washington/new York politico-media elite.
Imus also had a charitable side. He and his wife ran the Imus Ranch, a cattle ranch near Ribera, N.M., where children with cancer or serious blood disorders, and those who had lost siblings to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, could work as cowhands and experience a cowboy lifestyle.
However, Imus’ uncensored style landed him in trouble on more than a few occasions as he routinely made offensive remarks on his program about gays, Jews, blacks and women. But nothing he said compared with the tempest prompted by his remarks on April 4, 2007, when he made a racist and misogynist crack about the mostly black Rutgers University women’s basketball team.
The comment might have passed without notice were his show solely on radio. But at the time his show was also simulcast on cable TV channel MSNBC, and the video snippet soon took on a life of its own across the Internet. Finally, on April 12, Imus was fired, ending his syndicated program.
He largely disappeared from public life for about eight months. But on Dec. 4, 2007, Imus returned to the airwaves on WABC-AM (with a simulcast on Fox Business Network added in the fall of 2009).
He introduced a new cast of characters, including two black comedians, and told listeners he had learned his lesson: “I didn’t see any point in going on some sort of Larry King tour to offer a bunch of lame excuses for making an essentially reprehensible remark about innocent people who did not deserve to be made fun of.”
Despite the uproar, Imus’ career will not be overshadowed by the Rutgers remark, Taylor said.
“He really didn’t want to go out that way,” he said. “He wanted to redeem himself in the eyes of those people. When he said he was sorry, he was really speaking from the heart.”
Braxton writes for the Los Angeles Times.